Wed. Inspiration – Architectural Photography

I’ve been studying Architectural photography a lot lately and I’ve come across some really great websites. Thomas Grubba photography is one of them. He’s got a great portfolio of both interior and exterior photos. Plus, I really liked his Kitchen section as I’m a sucker for a really well designed kitchen (not that I cook) As I looked through his site it made me want to do two things: 1) I kept trying to dissect the lighting. Most architectural photography is a mixture of available light and some type of continuous or strobe lighting and I like to see if I can tell which is being used where. 2) It made me want a new house. Don’t get me wrong, I love my house but some of these places are absolutely gorgeous.

Next, one of the leaders in real estate photography, Scott Hargis, has a great portfolio as well. He’s got some beautiful exterior and interior stuff. Plus, if you’re interested in this type of work I dug up an interview with him that I thought was a great read. Here’s the link.

Finally, here’s a link to Randy Van Duinen photography. Randy’s been a friend of mine for a few years and he’s just got an awesome portfolio (as well as being a really nice guy). Randy helps out at Photoshop World and I see his photos every time I’m there and I always have the same response – “I’m following you next time we go out on a photo shoot!”. Seriously, he’s very talented and I’m hoping to accompany him on some projects in the coming months to see what tips I can pull from him when it comes to architectural photography.

All in all, I think this type of work is great and I’ve been exploring it more and more lately. I actually have a few shoots set up in the Tampa area so I’ll keep you posted. Enjoy!

Matt is the Vice President of Photography for onOne Software and a Tampa-based photographer. He's a best selling author of over 20 books and teaches Lightroom and Photoshop at seminars and conferences around the world.

Excellent post and is good to see a few names from The photography for real estate group posted here. Photographyforrealestet.net is what got me into the business over 2 years ago now. I quit my job and become a real estate photographer!

Thanks for a really great post recognizing some fellow real estate photographers. Scott and Thomas both involved in a phenomenal online real estate photography community which is a great learning resource at:http://photographyforrealestate.net

A number of real estate shooters also post setup shots (which Scott Hargis did on a recent shoot of his) which help others learn good positioning technique for using multiple off camera strobes as I and many other real estate photographers typically do.

Another really excellent architectural shooter is M. James Northen whose portfolio is at http://jnorthen.com/.

I’ve used the Kelby 7-Point System (usually a few of the points) on a number of my images with nice results. Keep up the good work “Photoshop Guys”, Photoshop TV rocks.

I find a lot of the regular architectural work to be like so many real estate displays, competent and descriptive, but not exactly in tune with the ‘architecture’. Randy’s was certainly the most interesting of the three.

The Portugese work of Fernando Guerra however was really good to see – thanks ZM for pointing that out.

Try to take a look at:http://ultimasreportagens.com/ultimas/index.html
It is the site of a Portuguese photographer, almost totally dedicated to architecture photography. I think he is one of the best architecture photographers in the world.
Thank you for your suggestions.
ZM

Matt,
You mentioned analysing the mix of available and artificial light. Another very useful way of dealing with extremes of dim and bright natural light (for example, a shot of an interior but which includes a window view) is to take a number of shots (on a tripod) at different exposures (varying the shutter speed, not the aperture) and either merge them in HDR in Photoshop or just manually layer them with masks to use the optimum part of each image. Looking at Thomas’s interior shots, I would guess this is what he’s done.

Cameras can’t cope with the dynamic range of the eye (yet!), so this is just a way of exending the range to achieve a correct exposure throughout the image.